Academic development for knowledge capabilities: Learning, reflecting and developing

Abstract

In this paper, we look backwards to educational development principles and practices as implemented in the 1990s at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and forward to ideal principles and practices for the design of courses for teachers in higher education. The bridge between the two lies partly in an evaluation study, which we will describe, and partly in the theoretical work of John Bowden on knowledge capabilities for learning for an unknown future. The underlying framework depends on phenomenography, with its theoretical emphasis on learning as becoming able to discern the whole from its background, and how the constituents of the whole relate to one another and to the whole, and its empirical emphasis on qualitative variation in the ways in which students understand, conceptualize or experience phenomena they meet in their studies. A PET model and PET process are described, relating Practice, Experience and Theory through reflective problematization.

Acknowledgements

John Bowden was very influential in all that lay behind the educational development courses described in this paper. For the first thing, one of the authors (S.B.) spent three months at RMIT in 1990 when John was building up the highly influential ERADU (Educational Research and Development Unit) at RMIT, and found there a surprisingly vibrant environment to work in. That inspired her move from educational research at Göteborg University, where John had been a regular visitor, to work with educational development at nearby Chalmers, and to build a research‐oriented unit similar to that at ERADU. John had also spent time working at Chalmers with teachers and their projects and continued to do so, supporting both research and developments there until quite recently.

We wish to acknowledge support from the Department of Education and the Centre for Learning, Lund University, for the time to write this paper, and for funding from Crafoord Stiftelse and from the Swedish Council for the Renewal of Higher Education for research and development in our positions. Thanks also to Chalmers, which in earlier times had the foresight to fund research and development in learning and teaching with their own teaching in focus, and to our colleagues then: Inga Alander, Christer Alvegård, Erling Fjeldstad, the late Mats Martinsson, who made working there so fruitful and such fun. Thanks are due to Gerlese Åkerlind, for help with revising the original manuscript, and one of the anonymous reviewers for his or her constructive criticism. And thanks to John Bowden and all his collaborators who brought so much to understanding and acting in the cause of learning and teaching in higher education.